Automated legislative drafting: generating paraphrases of legislation

In this paper, we describe which roles deep structures of law play in (automatic) drafting legislation. Deep structures contain a formal description of the intended normative effects of a new regulation. We discuss mechanisms that can be used to generate different paraphrases of regulations. Since it is possible to test the paraphrases on legal knowledge based systems, we have provided two extra design steps in legislative drafting which can be supported by automated tools. Deep structures are straightforward descriptions of the normative effects of regulations. Each deep structure distinguishes desired and undesired behaviour, and has no further internal structure, such ss paragraphs or exception structures. This paper describes methods to translate a deep structure into representations of different types of codes, i.e. paraphrases. Each representation of a code hsa a different surface structure, according to the choice we make during the translation regarding: a) the initial assumptions of the regulation, i.e. modelling from desired or undesired behaviour, b) the level of abstraction, c) the viewpoint of the law, i.e. the category of norm subjects, and d) the type of deontic modalities the regulation largely uses. All paraphrases have the same ‘effects’ sa the deep structure, but with different features, and are suitable for different gords.